Business Mindset Expert Alicia Cramer | Incite Tax

All right, everyone, welcome to the Insightful Podcast. We have an amazing guest with us today, Alicia Kramer. So Alicia, you work with a lot of mindset stuff, and I've seen this in my clients as well. Tell me what comes to mind when you think about small business owners and their fear that gets in the way of their success.

Fear is a huge obstacle for everyone, but we know in business we are stretching outside of our old comfort zone in a lot of different ways. So we don't have the luxury of putting off decisions or paying your taxes, right? These things are— they're mission critical. It's like right now, right? You, you're afraid of cutting that check, you're afraid of hiring that other key employee because of the money that it is going to cost you, you don't have the luxury of time, which means we need to get into the subconscious. We need to clean that stuff up because time is of the essence. And as they say, money loves speed. So there's no time to be wrestling with our fears as entrepreneurs if we want to accelerate our success.

Interesting. Good. So, um, for everyone listening, Alicia is a hypnotherapist and a mindset coach. She's a renowned mindset expert, international bestselling author, coach, consultant, and a serial entrepreneur. She's also created the Inner Game Academy. She has multiple books. Her most recent one is titled Energetic Alignment. On that note with fear, tell me, how does this ring true, or have you seen this play out where, you maybe got in one of your clients' ways, but one of the things I joke about with my team is as the owner, I am the most incompetent person and I'm the only one who really feels that way. At the end of the day, it's like, hey, I had a company and it made $500,000 that year. Cool. Now I know how to run a company that makes $500,000 in a year. But the next year we grew. I've never had a company that ran a million. Okay. But then once I did, I did it. But like in that growing company, Like, I don't even know. How does that get in the way of business owners accomplishing what they want?

When we understand how our minds work, it starts to make a lot more sense why we feel the way that we feel. And what we have to understand is our mind is really just a data processor. So everything that we've experienced, The things that we've seen, the things that we've heard, and we're talking all the way back to we were a little bitty, right? And we're just little sponges taking in the world through our senses and trying to make sense of what we're seeing from a very limited pool of data. Now, here we are, and we think that we understand life based on what we've observed, what we've witnessed, what we've heard. And that is, like I said, very limited. So we get kind of comfortable with what is known to our mind. The problem is when we are reaching for a next level, when we have goals, they're not like, hey, let me have more of the same shit that I have, you know, already. It's, hey, let's go for this next milestone in my business. Let's reach for this new level financially. Let's grow to X number more employees. We are doing something that is unknown to our mind. That creates inner conflict. Our mind, its job, especially our subconscious mind, right? What does it do? It regulates all of our body stuff. It keeps us alive. It keeps us away from danger. And so when we are doing something that is unknown to the subconscious mind, it naturally fires off all of these warning bells. It creates fear. That's why we are so prone to sort of staying in our status quo. So here we are as entrepreneurs, and we're setting these goals, and we're reaching for new and unknown, and we are consistently bumping up against all of this stuff in our subconscious mind that says it's not safe, we don't know what we're doing, who the fuck do you think you are doing that, right? And those things are constantly like weights that are holding us back, pulling us down, slowing down our growth and our progress, causing us to second-guess our ourselves, causing us to experience fear and self-doubt and questioning our worthiness. And so we have to start to do things a little bit different. And that's where hypnosis and all of that mindset-shifting work comes into play. We've got to start to work with our mind instead of against our mind if we really want to start to get traction. And even then, You're still gonna bump up against fear. You're still gonna experience the imposter syndrome. You know, all of those things are just natural phenomenon that occur, but we can mitigate some of those negative side effects when we start to actually, like, put into practice processes that help us retrain the mind to think, act, and feel, to have beliefs that are more aligned with those next-level goals.

So whether someone we see is having phenomenal success or someone who maybe doesn't have phenomenal success, what you're saying is both of them naturally are going to have that same inner conflict.

To varying degrees. So let's look at it in a really practical way that anybody can, can say, yeah, I get that. So somebody who grew up in a family where there was a lot of neglect and maybe there was some emotional abuse, they developed some really dysfunctional belief about themselves and about life. That person is going to struggle in life a lot more than somebody who was raised in an environment where there was a prosperity mindset, where they were given a lot of positive encouragement, where they were taught to sort of bounce back from adversity and challenges. It's really obvious to us. We get it. We see it all around us. This is just something that is kind of common sense. Sense, right? So when I say that everybody is going to experience this to varying degrees, what I mean is that person who grew up in the affluent home with the entrepreneurial parents who were making millions of dollars in their business and normalized that type of mindset, they're going to have less of those sort of gripping, you know, stomach-churning fears perhaps than somebody who was programmed throughout their entire life, it's not safe, and get a secure job and save for a rainy day and, you know, all of that type of stuff. But it's still there, right? It's, it's just different.

It's funny, as you're saying that, I was thinking about in my early 20s, I was assigned to do some work with this guy, and we worked together for about 4 months. And he came from that affluent neighborhood. His parents were well off. I didn't. We, you know, whenever I had a new sports season and I had to get new shoes, like I was breaking the bank for my parents, you know? And we were talking about how when he was a teenager, you know, early 20s, so long ago from that time period, he was like, yeah, I had a window cleaning business. I made $1,000 a week during the summertime, blah, blah, blah. He's just, I refused to work for a job that didn't pay me $25 an hour in income. And here I'm at that time, you know, with my age, whatever, like minimum wage was somewhere around $7 an hour or something. I remember being blown away, like, oh, the audacity of this guy. Like, you're in your early 20s. What makes you special than some of these older people I know that are working $10 an hour? But it's interesting because our upbringing and what we've experienced and the way we're spoken to about money and things like that. It affected just in that exact scenario. So you do a lot of money mindset stuff and you mentioned the way we get over this, whatever varying degree, we have to work with our mind. Can you give us some ideas on what that means?

We need to identify what some of those messed up beliefs are. The saying, you know, if you don't know what's broke, how do you fix it? It's, it's so true. There are people who are trying really, really hard to succeed in business, and they cannot figure out why none of the tactics are working, why they hear this person over there did the exact same thing and they're crushing it, and they just cannot seem to get any type of traction. They don't understand why that person over there went to the Tony Robbins event and it transformed their life. And they went to the Tony Robbins event and they're still struggling. There are these deep-rooted— I like to call them insidious beliefs that we have in our subconscious mind. It's part of our self-image. The person who is telling themselves that it's always hard, it's always a struggle, nothing works for me, they don't even recognize that they're doing it. Because they have become desensitized to the self-talk. Our self-image is so ingrained that it's not even obvious to us what a lot of these beliefs are that are the very beliefs that are creating these challenges and obstacles for us. So when I'm working with a client or if they are going through one of my programs, like I have the Money Mindset Intensive is a program that I created where I go into this process of of uncovering shit that we are doing to ourselves so that we can begin to reprogram ourselves. Now, what a lot of people don't realize is that our most deep-rooted beliefs, the ones that are really messing with us, have a lot of negative emotional charge. So what I mean by that is the stronger and more intense the emotion The more anchored that belief is. And when we identify what those beliefs are, we can actually start to neutralize the emotion associated with them. And when we neutralize the emotion associated with the belief, the belief no longer has the control that it once had. And now all of that good positive programming work that we've been doing, like reading all of the personal development books, going to all of the rah-rah motivational seminars, all that good stuff that we've been trying to believe about ourselves. Now we can actually really like anchor that in, lock that in. It becomes a new self-image for us, and now we can just hit the ground running. But until we clean up that wacky shit, we are at the mercy of it Controlling our behaviors, creating all sorts of patterns of self-sabotage. Like the person who is so obsessed with creating this goal, a financial goal, for example, they'll have an amazing month, right? Some crazy, like, out-of-the-box thing for them. They hit it, and for a split second, they're like, "Oh yeah, I got this shit." They're like, "Game over. It's it's all good now. You know, I'm the I'm the winner." I'm transformed. Look at me go. That old belief, though, that old self-image is going to start to creep back in. And that's the person who's like broke a month later. And what we've got to do is we've got to really identify what is that stuff. We've got to take the negative emotional charge off of it, and we've got to reprogram ourselves to really embody these new beliefs, this new self-image that becomes the foundation for the success that we want to create for ourselves.

So about 10 years ago, probably 15 years ago, I would've told you I felt like mindset stuff was kind of like, gimme a break. Let me, I'll read the self-help books. I'll go to the hoorah stuff. They'll gimme tactics. It'll be fine. What do you say to someone like me? You've gotta come across people like me who are like, dude, I'm not—

You're, you're not ready. It's okay. It's all right. You know, after you, you, fall down and scrape your knees enough times, you're gonna say to yourself, okay, I'm missing something here. I, I keep hearing it from everybody. I'm hearing it from my mentors. I'm hearing it from all the gurus, even in my own industry. But I just wasn't ready. And it's okay.

Interesting.

It's, it's okay. You know, we try to force readiness, like the intervention, you know. Oh, I love, you know, I, I love my brother and, and he's a drug addict, you know. We got to get in there and we got to, we got to change him. We got to get him to see the error of his ways. Well, guess what, friends? Until your sweet brother is ready, till he's hit whatever his psychological, emotional rock bottom is, he's just going to sneak around behind your back and keep doing it, right? He's got to be ready. And it's the same with us. Sometimes we got to take a lot of hard knocks. I like to say I am a very slow learner. I am an incredibly slow learner. I've been on this journey for a long time, and luckily I've, um, you know, I've, I've leveraged some of my hard knocks to pull my head out of my ass, uh, and I've achieved some really incredible things. But there's still like, there's a lot of slow learning stuff going on here, right? And we have to just accept that, you know, do it your way. Go ahead, do it your way until you get to the point where you're just My way is not working. And then you get the help because then you're ready.

That's such a great point, you know? So that means if you're listening to this, you're like, man, this isn't for me. Look, that just means you're not ready. And hey, you know, go ahead, keep suffering until you realize it. For me, my rock bottom moment was I had a couple employees at the same time that just were not working out, and I could not bring myself to firing them. I'm like, what is getting in the way? And so I started working with a business psychologist to understand where that was stemming from. And we, I did a lot of work like for about 3 years in a row, and that's when I became a believer. So it's interesting too, you know, you, you mentioned this before, which also resonates with the idea, if I'm not ready, I'm not ready, which means we don't know what we don't know. And I think in this scenario, we need someone like you to help pull out what it is that's in our subconscious or the past experience that we didn't realize actually hindered us. What, what do you say to that?

I've been doing this work for a long time. In fact, it'll be 2 decades in 2026. Now, I've been working exclusively with business owners since around, what, 2011? I've seen Firsthand. It does not matter how successful you are. It does not matter how much you've already achieved. It does not matter how much your net worth is. It doesn't matter how large you've grown your business or if you've been struggling for a very long time. Does not matter. The mind works the same, works the same for everyone. Now, our experiences have all been slightly You know, different, but the process is the same. Does not matter how young you are, how old you are, how many books you've read. If you've never cracked a book in your life, does not matter. The process is always the same. And here's the interesting thing. We have a little bit of an idea of what's going on. Now it's like it's always there. It's not unconscious. We're not completely oblivious to it. We're just desensitized to it. And we're somewhat— it's like if you've grown up in, you know, upper northern hemisphere, you're acclimated to the cold.

Okay?

And so it's still cold. You're still like, my body doesn't love this. But you've adjusted to it. You've acclimated to it. You're dealing with it. Our wiring is such that it will adapt. So we adapt to our own bullshit. We know it's there, but because we're so accustomed to it, we can't really pinpoint it. We're not like the— we're not able to sometimes see what we're doing to ourselves. So I can be working with a client who has maybe been like a lifer, meaning I've got clients that they'll stick with me for a long time because they just keep upleveling and they're like, I don't want— I can't figure this shit out on my own, you know? So they know the process. They know they could practically do my job if they really were, you know, like if they really wanted to, because I've gone through it with them so many times and They will be sitting across from me on the Zoom screen and they start to go into their story and they are trying to convince me that it is a real limitation. There is nothing that they can do about it. It is just— they are screwed, right? And because I've been doing this so long and because this is my gift, right? Your gift is numbers. My gift is people's fucked up stuff, right? I have to really, like, hold, you know, this is tough love, friends. This is, you know, I'm not mean about it, but I'm also not going to let you get away with this because I know that this is exactly the thing that you're tripping over consistently. And so I go in there and I will force you to sit with that. And shift it. We're not gonna— your, your subconscious mind is like, okay, well, we can't deal with this. This is our fear. We're afraid of this. We're protecting ourselves from the thing that we're afraid of by believing this. And so, no, no, no, Alicia, you're not gonna get in my head and let this fear go, right? But I will hold my clients to the standard, knowing that when we shift that, it's gonna get better. And that's where the magic starts to happen. You've got to be able to identify those things. Otherwise, they're just going to continue to come up over and over and over again.

It's interesting you say that. Forcing someone to sit with whatever the limitation is, is different than someone not being ready, right? Like, because you said you can't force someone if they're not ready. We're talking about someone who's identified, I'm ready to learn. Okay. Hey, well, as your coach, I've helped you identify this thing. Oh no, that's not it. No, it is. Let's, let's stay with it. I thought it was interesting to me to think about that. Now, before we wrap up on your website, I wanted to make sure I asked this question because there was something that was intriguing to me. You talk about universal laws and then man-made success principles. Can you just highlight briefly for us what that means? And good or bad, what, what is that?

We as human beings love to know it all, don't we? Like, our ego is like, oh shit, I got this figured out. You know, look at me, I'm the expert, I'm the guru. And throughout, um, I'd say the past 100, 200 years, there's really been this sort of explosion of understanding universal laws metaphysical principles. We've really seen that accelerate over the past, you know, couple of decades, but it's been ongoing. It's, you know, not— it didn't even start with Napoleon Hill writing Think and Grow Rich. It was going on well before that. When you have these incredibly driven entrepreneurial people, right, they are looking for the formula to success, and they're formulating conclusions based on what appears to be a of evidence to validate their hypothesis. There is a difference though between our hypothesis of what creates success and what actually makes this universe operate. And so as a student of metaphysics with a master's degree in metaphysical science, right, I've been studying this stuff and I love studying success principles as well, but I've always been challenged Is this actually aligned with the laws of the universe? Like, gravity, we could say, is a law of the universe. It is a law. Just because you don't believe in it doesn't mean it's not affecting you. And just because a bird flies does not mean that gravity isn't a law. It just means that there is another law that is sort of interwoven. Mm-hmm. Supersedes to some extent the law of gravity, but it does not ever negate the law of gravity. Universal laws are like that. They cannot be negated. There is no one that is exempt from the laws of the universe. Success principles are maybe sometimes 80% of the time, 90% of the time. They may be truisms, but they are not absolute law. And when we start to understand the difference between the two, now we are actually allowing ourselves to challenge some of the limits that have been put on us by these success principles and some of the mental fuckery that these ideas and these concepts create within us, because a part of us knows something about it just isn't quite right.

Yeah.

And so we embrace and we adopt success principles that are in alignment with But we leverage them and use them in a way that is more congruent with how the universe actually works so that we're not getting in our way with man-made concepts.

I love that. I remember when I first read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I thought it was the best book ever because that's how my brain works. It wasn't until like 5 years later that it came up in a conversation and someone was like, I think that's the stupidest book ever. I didn't get it. It's ridiculous. I'm like, what are you talking about? Because this person just, they operate differently, which is totally fine. I don't know how many times I've had clients that are like, oh my gosh, I tried out this thing and now I'm frustrated. It's not working. Like, yeah, but to your point, those are manmade success principles that worked for one person and you need to give yourself flexibility and grace to say Like, that doesn't exactly work for me. And it wasn't until I realized that where I could then take information from different places I was going to and realize, look, they're not a bad person just because what they're teaching isn't completely in alignment with what I'm doing. I can pull out what works, but it's our job to understand that element. Like, this is in alignment with me, therefore I'm going to try it out. Or that's not quite in alignment with me. I'm glad. Okay, more power to you. That works for you. But not for me.

Yeah.

Alicia, thank you so much for being on. Tell people how to learn more about you and find out stuff.

Everything is going to be available on my website, aliciacramer.com. A-L-I-C-I-A-C-R-A-M-E-R.com. Uh, you can connect with me through social. You can find links to my book, links to my Inner Game Academy. You can book a consultation. Uh, you can just snoop around. I've got tons of hypnosis audios and energy releasing processes and mindset trainings and affirmation tracks and all sorts of stuff for reprogramming your mind for free on my YouTube channel. Links to everything is on the website.

Excellent. AliciaKramer.com. Check her out, people. You won't be disappointed. Remember, profit is a choice. Have the courage and wisdom to choose it.